If you’re engaged in digital marketing, I invite you to try a simple experiment. In a rare quiet moment,
sit back, close your eyes and ask yourself if you actually like your branded website.

That’s “like,” as in actively enjoy using it, as in looking forward to its latest updates, as in almost feeling sorry for your competition because your website is way cooler.

If I had to guess, your answer will be, “Well, it could be worse.”

Having looked at branded sites in many different categories over the last decade, I can’t help thinking this is the likely answer at least 80% of the time. Part of the problem is expectation.

Fact is, website design, execution and maintenance has been so mediocre for so long that few people expect a website to be more than a collection of boxy stock art captioned with rigidly standardized “copy tone.”

Sure, maybe there’s a marquee on the home page. Maybe there’s a quiz, contest, video link or embedded e-marketing platform. But what’s missing is the one thing consumers care about: themselves. No wonder the garden-variety branded website gets ignored: It’s about a brand instead of a person.

The distance between consumer and brand is nowhere more apparent than on e-tail sites that engage in price-point jockeying instead of providing meaningful shopping advice. Despite oceans of market research to the contrary, most people realize that making shopping decisions based on peer reviews is tantamount to opening their souls to the jaws of Hell.

Looking past the code…
Now, ranting aside, it’s obvious that even utterly functional e-tail sites manage to sell stuff. So why bother building a website you can be proud of? The answer lies in how completely you want to discourage brand loyalty.

After all, if your business is based on being the low-cost leader, you can always be undercut, especially by a company who offers a feeling of belonging. How many people, for example, can’t do a “hat trick,” yet crave a pair of Jordan Super.Fly4s? Or, by the same token, will never own a Winchester XPR, but are hooked on the classic style of LL Bean?

Consumers can get sneakers or flannel shirts for the same price or less all over town. But people who get hooked on a feeling will bookmark, tag and share your site over and over again. Why? Because human beings are inherently, intrinsically, insistently emotional. Our motivation to act depends on an established emotional connection. Do you really need to attend another Webinar to know that?

All you need is to walk away from the rigid conventions that have grown up around digital marketing and talk to people in a real voice about themselves.

…to a distinctive thought process
Now, you’ll notice that neither LL Bean, nor Nike piles up its web pages with conventional marketing trash like “Our Promise to You, the Consumer.” You won’t find any talk about “fine quality” in the upfront. It’s just that the products themselves, lovingly photographed, have grown out of a thought process, an ongoing communication with an audience segment each brand understands. The advertising works because the brand works.

So if you’re answer to my initial question is an unwavering “Meh,” you may need to look way deeper than whether or not a flat design makeover is in your future. You may need to start at the root of your problem —the lackluster emotional appeal of your product. Want to fix your website? Start by fixing your brand.

If your primary marketing message:

…revolves around price, you can be undersold
…includes buzzwords like “quality,” you’re generating background noise
…is a celebrity endorsement, what happens when the celebrity melts down?

But if your message speaks directly and honestly to the identity your audience wants to claim for itself, an identity with a sharp emotional hook, you can generate loyalty on a scale a flood of coupon offers can’t match.

And in case the point is lost on you, a website built around that hook will come as close as any can to driving sales and fulfilling the promise of digital marketing. Not because your programmers have mastered HTML5, but because you, amigo, have mastered branding.